From View From The Top, 28 January 2026
By the Time You Read It in the FT, It’s Too Late
Uncertainty, why capital is quietly repositioning — and what the squeezed middle tells us about the next cycle
Kicking off the new year has been a bit strange this year.
Normally I’d spend Christmas reviewing the past year and what worked and what didn’t, draw up ideas and plans for the new year to share with the team, and hit the ground running after a long holiday.
This year I didn’t have the same enthusiasm as I’ve had for the last 30 years in this business and I’m feeling a quiet disconnect in the market right now which makes doing deals difficult and investing challenging.
Publicly, we’re still debating inflation paths, rate cuts, election risk, and whether “this is the year things start to loosen up.” We’ve heard to lines for years now, and it’s starting to get rather redundant and less inspiring than ever before. But privately, capital has already started to move.
Not loudly. Not at great scale. But deliberately.
Family offices and private investors aren’t waiting for consensus. There is a shift in wealth and investment strategy. Old business models are feeling new directions based on generational wealth sifts and capital seeking better tax incentives and opportunities. They’re repositioning while the noise is focused elsewhere — they are looking at platform investments, GP co-invest, smaller ticket sizes, tighter structures, and fewer assumptions. By the time the headlines agree, the real allocations will already be done. Privately.
Capital Is Moving — Because Supply Has Broken
Looking back at what we’ve been discussing this past year, one of the least discussed movements taking place and green light signals sits on the supply side of residential rental accommodation. BTR or multifamily (depending on where you’re from).
Construction starts across the UK are now lower than they were after the Global Financial Crisis. That’s not a cyclical dip — it’s a structural stall.
Rising build costs, planning friction, financing gaps, and risk aversion have combined to shut down new delivery at precisely the moment demand is becoming more durable.
Capital sees this clearly.
When supply dries up:
- Location matters less than affordability
- Operations matter more than design
- Stability matters more than growth narratives
- Location matters less than affordability
- Operations matter more than design
- Stability matters more than growth narratives
This isn’t a return to defensiveness. It’s a recalibration away from traditional ways of investing. When global PE and investment managers deliver less than broad index funds, private investors look for a more direct way to deploy. They look around what actually holds up when those institutional pitch deck assumptions fail.
Capital hasn’t gone risk-off — it’s gone assumption-off.
A Personal Aside
I remember the year before the Global Financial Crisis very clearly.
All my friends were buying new cars like changing underwear. Clubbing. Travelling. Spending. The world felt figured out. Everyone it seemed was making money.
Investors I’d approached years earlier — when I was building at what now seem like absurd cap rates of 17% — had given me flat-out “no’s” suddenly were piling in at 5%.
We were preparing to list our company. My friends were doing the same.
The feeling felt bizarrely odd.
Then I got a phone call — that opened my eyes, and I saw the green light and I started selling. When everyone else was a buyer. That was late 2007.
It reminded me of a historic trade I’d made years earlier on the floor on Wall Street. I couldn’t fully model it. I couldn’t neatly explain it. But I knew in my gut it was right.
Two weeks before the crisis, I had sold everything. Forrest Gump.
Today, the world is different. It hasn’t had that same euphoric feeling for a long time.
Today the world and finance is more connected. More digital. More leveraged — across everything. More political. More uncertain.
Risk doesn’t feel like a single event anymore. It feels more like death by a thousand cuts. And then you die.
What still surprises me is that no single shock over the past seven years has triggered a true asset reset. It’s baffling, really. A lot of people have bet on that reset and have been wrong.
Which is why, personally, I keep coming back to fundamentals — especially where supply and demand are visibly broken because otherwise I cannot figure things out.
Rental housing is one of those places.
I think someone once said: when you don’t know what else to do, build residential. Resi is safe. And today in the UK and Europe, boiling for the middle seems like the only sensible thing to do.
That advice feels quietly relevant again.
From Scale to Certainty
The last cycle rewarded size, leverage, and abstraction.
The next one is rewarding:
- Visibility over velocity
- Operator quality over projected IRRs
- Governance over growth stories
- Visibility over velocity
- Operator quality over projected IRRs
- Governance over growth stories
Instead of blind-pool exposure, we’re seeing:
- Smaller commitments
- Co-investments and joint ventures
- Capital seeking control, not just access
- Smaller commitments
- Co-investments and joint ventures
- Capital seeking control, not just access
This isn’t fear. It’s maturity.
In a world where refinancing risk is real and exits are slower, certainty has become more valuable than optionality.
The Squeezed Middle — And the End of Rental Stigma
For decades, renting carried a quiet stigma.
It was seen as temporary. Transitional. Something you did before you succeeded — or, worse, because you hadn’t.
That cultural framing is breaking down.
A growing cohort of middle-income households now rents not because of instability, but because of arithmetic. They have steady jobs, families, and long-term plans — they’re simply priced out of ownership in the places they need to live.
Culturally, renting is no longer read as failure. It’s increasingly understood as pragmatic.
And that shift matters.
Because when renting becomes normalised rather than stigmatised, tenant behaviour changes:
- Longer tenures
- Lower churn
- Greater emphasis on quality of management rather than aspiration
- Longer tenures
- Lower churn
- Greater emphasis on quality of management rather than aspiration
What was once an awkward in-between category has quietly become a large, stable demographic.
From Aspirational Living to Functional Stability
This is where capital is starting to pay attention.
Not to luxury-led schemes or amenity arms races, but to housing that does something very simple, very well:
- Provides stability
- Matches real incomes
- Is run competently
- Provides stability
- Matches real incomes
- Is run competently
This isn’t affordable housing. It isn’t lifestyle branding. It’s functional housing for people who keep the system running.
And in a low-supply environment, that functionality becomes investable.
Returns here don’t rely on heroics. They rely on people continuing to work, live, and prioritise predictability — which, historically, they always do.
Why This Moment Attracts Patient Capital
Ironically, the uncertainty dominating the macro conversation is exactly what’s making this moment attractive for long-term capital.
Why?
- Entry pricing is more rational
- New supply is constrained
- Operational quality finally matters again
- Entry pricing is more rational
- New supply is constrained
- Operational quality finally matters again
The squeezed middle works precisely because it doesn’t depend on market timing. It depends on resilience.
And resilience, in this cycle, is what capital is quietly buying.
A Note on Transition
One final observation.
Periods like this don’t just test balance sheets — they test identities and old business models.
A lot of people at the top of businesses are navigating shifts that don’t show up in those models:
- From growth to stewardship
- From momentum to judgment
- From noise to consequence
- From growth to stewardship
- From momentum to judgment
- From noise to consequence
Those transitions are rarely discussed publicly, especially while deals are still live and outcomes unresolved.
For now, it’s enough to say this: markets reset long before narratives do. And the hardest adjustments aren’t always financial.
More on that when the timing is right.
